At any moment in California, 13,000 young people are detained in juvenile halls and another 4,500 are in the California Youth Authority. More than 75% of these young people wind up back behind bars within a year of their release.

Behind these cold statistics are thousands of individual stories of young people who do not go back behind bars, but who find a way to turn their lives around.

These video diaries tell the stories of those who succeed and the struggles that they face when they try to gain traction on the outs, after years of being in and out of the system.

Part of the solution for these young people is The Beat Within program, which conducts weekly writing and conversation workshops in the juvenile halls and then publishes these writings every week.

The young people featured in these video diaries speak in their own words and tell the stories of the realities they faced as troubled children and the realities they now face as young adults on the mend.

Issues of the weekly magazine are available on the Archive.